Research Interest Statement: My research agenda is centered on transition processes and collective
situations in which individuals are confronted with decisions that
challenge their sense of self-interest, preservation or identity. I have
been investigating aristocrats facing new matrimonial regulations in
Europe in the central middle ages, parliamentarians confronted with the
prospect of their own collective abdication, political leaders devising
strategies of political survival and/or democratic consolidation in
times of democratic crisis, and civil servants confronted with the task
of enforcing inhumane policies. In these different instances, to
identify collective processes and reconstruct the specifics of the
relevant empirical cases, I draw on multifaceted tools of
analysis—formal, quantitative and hermeneutic—applied to a variety of
historical sources. This approach combines historical research with a
set of methods geared to probing the empirical soundness of hypotheses
that can be transposed to different times and places.